As computing has become more mobile, client devices have shrunk in size, leaving little “real estate” on which to display text and images. This problem is particularly acute for images to be displayed on a faceted search engine result page (SERP), since most of the SERP is given over to textual search results. Thus, only a few images can be meaningfully shown in a SERP displayed on a client device such as a smartphone.
Ideally, these few images will include images that are relatively engaging, when compared to other images of the same subject. However, identifying engaging images in an automated fashion is difficult, even when the images are of celebrities and click-through data for the images is plentiful. When the subject of the images is less famous and click-through data for the images is sparse, human editors tend to be used instead of automation.